E-Commerce stores have a distinct advantage over bricks and mortar retail locations – the ability to track and understand every action a customer takes. But beyond the simple pageview, deciding exactly which of these actions to track is where your work starts.

You could of course have customized tracking right out of the box with the Woopra for Magento plugin. But what if you’re not using Magento? For the third installment of our what to track series, we’ll take a look at the key components of a successful e-commerce analytics implementation.

Stage 1: Pre-Sale

Most of the activity on your site likely happens pre-sale. That’s when customers are exploring your site, looking through your products, and managing their carts. All of this activity needs to be tracked. Remember that along with the events, you will also want to send properties, which are pieces of information that describe the event.

For example, the table below outlines some of the key events and properties you should be sending outside of the basic pageview.

Event: Add To Cart

Property

Product name

Property

Product price

Event: Estimate Shipping

Property

Zipcode

Event: Compare Products

Property

Product name

Property

SKU

Event: Read Product Reviews

Property

Product name

Property

Product category

Event: Catalog Search

Property

Search keyword

Sending properties with your events is extremely important because it gives you a lot more capability to analyze your data in different ways and ultimately answer more complex questions. For example, by sending the “product name” property with the “add to cart” event, we can generate this report:

Stage 2: Purchasing

Checkout Process

You will want to track all the steps of your checkout process, which will vary by website. For example, your checkout process may look like this:

Shipping Address Added

Shipping Method Added

Payment Method Added

Reviewed Checkout

Successful Checkout

It’s important to track the smaller steps within the checkout process because it will allow you to analyze the process and see where there may be problems. For example, in the funnel below, we can see the conversions at each step of the checkout process.

Creating Accounts

Customers may also have the option to create an account during the checkout process. If this is an option on your site, it’s extremely important to track this and include the properties that are sent with the event. It’s critical to send the email address property, which the system will then use to identify the visitor. This will give you customer profiles where the visitor is identified, such as in the example screenshot below.

Note that you may still identify customers even if they don’t create accounts so long as they submit their email address at some point in the checkout process. So long as you send the email address property to Woopra, you will be able to identify customers.

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Our blog explores the rapidly growing space of customer analytics. We discuss topics related to getting the most out of your analytics and offer actionable advice on ways to improve your customer lifecycle. Created, edited and curated by Woopra, the leader in real-time customer analytics.